THERE’S MORE TO FEEDER FISH­ING THAN JUST WEIGHT

OVER the course of a sea­son I get a lot of ques­tions sent to me about feeder fish­ing on rivers.

One of the most com­mon themes is about how to get the feeder to hold the bot­tom in fast flow. The ob­vi­ous an­swer is to keep adding weight un­til there’s enough to stop it mov­ing. There are sev­eral other things you can do to make things eas­ier, though.

First, think about your main­line. The thin­ner it is, the less drag there will be on it from the cur­rent. It needs to be strong enough to cast the feeder you are us­ing, of course, and it also needs to be strong enough to han­dle the fish you’re tar­get­ing, but I’ve seen peo­ple us­ing main­lines that are far too thick. In terms of di­am­e­ter, I carry river feeder lines be­tween 0.18mm and 0.30mm. These cover every­thing from tiny light­weight feed­ers up to those car­ry­ing 8oz of lead plus the con­tents in­side!

The next thing to con­sider is where you ac­tu­ally cast the feeder. I al­ways start off in front and cast the feeder just slightly up­stream be­fore let­ting it sink to the bot­tom. I them pay out a lot of slack line to put a bow in the line. This then ‘sets’ against the rod-tip and you’ll find you can get away with much less weight on the feeder than if you’re fish­ing di­rectly tight to it. Give these things a try next time you’re strug­gling to hold bot­tom.

It’s im­por­tant to use the right size weights on your river feed­ers.